Daily Reading for June 17 • The Third Sunday after Pentecost
I am not suggesting that anyone learn more about world religions in order to subvert them. Sacred truth is a very deep well into which human beings have been lowering leaky buckets for millennia. The more we learn about what other traditions have fetched up, the more we learn about our own. It is helpful, for instance, since Jesus was a Jew, to know that Judaism has no doctrine of original sin, and that salvation is conceived of as life lived in obedience to Torah. Heaven and hell have never been very lively concepts for most Jews, who find the Christian focus on the world to come more than a little irrelevant. The point of human life on earth, as any son or daughter of Torah can tell you, is to assist God in the redeeming of this world now.
It is also helpful to know that most eastern religions have very little to say about God at all. The Buddha taught that theological speculation is about as useful as wondering what kind of arrow has struck you in the chest. You may measure it if you want to. You may develop theories about where it came from, who shot it, and what kind of wood it is made from, but all in all your time would be better spent deciding how you are going to remove it from your body. The focus is not on orthodoxy—right belief—but on orthopraxis—right practice—which strikes me as a refreshing alternative to the heresy trials that have plagued my own denomination in recent years. Sin, in Buddhist teaching, is ignorance about the true nature of reality, and salvation is a matter of removing the arrow, or waking up.
From Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation by Barbara Brown Taylor (Cowley Publications, 2000).